Business & Start Ups Blog

War of the titans: Google vs Facebook

I had the pleasure of attending to a magnificent exhibition about technology and marketing in London on 21st and 22nd of September 2011, Ad Tech London.

This one was especially oriented to online marketing: Websites, SEO, advertising in search engines and obviously could not miss the monsters of the industry such as Microsoft, Google and Facebook, both grateful for much of their income on advertising in their search engines or in case of facebook in its own social network..

Developments came from the hand of Google, no doubt to me, the clear winner of the evening. I attended two presentations: the first focused on the ads which a webmaster place on their pages to earn revenue (Google AdSense) and other about emerging mobile market and the importance of having good presence in these devices (for advertisers and webmasters show sites through Google searches).

Both presentations were surprisingly good, very dynamic speakers and youth, with some very creative powerpoints and actually I imagine they have a specific team preparing these presentations (not think it was a powerpoint created by himself).

Also they presented the new Google's researches, attentive to what's next: Google TV (television quality with the advantages of Youtube: watch what you want, whenever and by the same searches on the web). They are also beginning to invest in their own television productions. And Google Wallet (wallet electronics embedded into the phone), that in addition to pay, you get coupons, loyalty gifts, etc.. Another future innovation will be to search through pictures taken with your phone, that means, based on the image and its location will get results and information. In short, Google each day will cover more and more.

I will not talk much about Microsoft and Bing, it simply they left me indifferent. I could say that are still alive because of its coalition with facebook, and now bing results will be conditioned by whether your friends like the web or are fans (the same than Google's +1), and where facebook shows maps with Bing maps. For the rest ... publicity about Xbox.

The high expectation and disappointment was for facebook. Poor presentation, after watching the wizards from Google, nothing new, only basic information about the use of profiles and pages for commercial use. Whoever has spent 30 minutes with that already knew. The speaker also failed to answer questions properly from the audience.